+1
Most of us didn’t even hear of the term piracy* in this context used till the record industry told us what it was.
Locking things down at the hardware level requires everyone to be using locked down hardware. And, even then, if you are displaying something, that display can be recorded. Even if you create monitors that use encrypted content, someone can take apart that monitor and hook up the electrical signals to something that can record it. Or set up camera in a way they can record it. From there, you can just put it in a DRM-free format that won’t be locked, making it playable on even locked down devices–since they aren’t going to cut off free video. Plus old devices don’t cease to exist.
Not that they currently have to go through anywhere near that level of work. Just get the video legit, copy it into any common PC, break the DRM if there is any, and share it.
Perhaps you recall a female artist – which one I can’t think of right away – who proposed, nay, challenged, her contemporaries to release their old, dormant catalogs online completely, for a price no more than 25 cents per song. Her reasoning was no one would balk at that price, and all artists would benefit, as those songs were bringing in zero right now, mostly because no one had access to them. Stop blocking or suing fans and make them happy instead.
How much of Napster was stuff like that? A fan mailing list I was on, in the early days of this, had big debates about the morality of copying available works (which almost everyone was against) versus copying rare or unavailable works (which aroused controversy.)
I doubt there is much of a market for Dylan Basement Tape bootlegs these days (except from historical interest) because the officially released version is so much better and more complete.
To summarize what a lot of people have said, piracy diminishes when the cost of getting it legally is less than the cost of getting it illegally, where cost is not just money but the hassle of working around protections, fear of downloading dangerous stuff, etc.
Some people built up massive libraries of movies they taped off of the TV, back in VCR days. I can’t imagine this happens much anymore since you can get them all on Netflix for basically 0 incremental cost. And not have a wall of boxes. I don’t know if that would count as piracy or not (probably not) but it demonstrates the point.
I wouldn’t know what percentage of Napster was which. It’s hard to remember how things once were. I remember trying to buy a 45 when the song had just slipped off the charts. The record store (the only one in town) didn’t have it, and wanted a deposit to order it, saying the chances were slim it could be had, ever. Once it was no longer a hit, it was invisible in the markets. Radio stations wouldn’t be caught dead playing last year’s hits, and Moldy Oldies and Stax of Wax stations were yet to be invented.
So for decades, if you wanted to find that particular recording, you were shit out of luck. It wasn’t in the golden oldies collections or anywhere else. But just for kix, I looked up the song on YouTube today, and found dozens of versions, some from exactly the same 45 I couldn’t buy back then.
How YouTube can provide it but Napster can’t, I can’t figure out.
When Napster first came around, it predated YouTube, iTunes or anything else, and was a chance to obtain the previously unobtainable.
The music industry, collectively, made a catastrophic error and it was all because of greed. They saw people buying their own collections of music again because CDs were higher quality and more durable than vinyl. The industry had already done that, to a lesser degree, with tapes (and video disks) but the CD and cheap CD players were a massive bonanza for record companies - no marketing, no hassle with artists, just put out old stuff on a piece of plastic that cost less than a dollar to make, and rake in the cash.
And the CDs weren’t as good as they make out, you were paying top-dollar prices for a bit of plastic and a piece of paper, and a lot of those bits of plastic held dire ‘collections’ or pre-fabricated rubbish.
I doubt copying music will ever be stopped, and musicians will likely use their recorded works as advertising for live shows.
The other point is that for many artists, they get pennies for a legally obtained song. It is a lot easier to rationalize that the only people getting hurt with piracy are large mega-corporations.
The current business model in entertainment is essentially legal piracy. Big companies set up a system that lets them skim all the money off of the people who actually create the product. These companies resent illegal piracy because people are stealing the money they wanted to steal.
If we rebuilt the model so people could buy products directly from the artist, it would remove most of the incentives for piracy. Prices would be lowered down to the actual level of the costs. And services like Patreon and Kickstarter show consumers are willing to pay the people who are actually producing stuff.
This is true in almost all cases for music I actually listen to. But there are various record label business models. Some just turn a band’s self-recorded content into CDs. Some offer promotion. Some offer recording studios and producers for a cut of album sales. And in other models (superstar pop), the record company basically writes the music, hires the musicians, records it, plans the tour, creates the stage persona, and holds the “artist’s” hand through every aspect of their career.
The more they do, the more the record company takes. It’s not like every artist gets the same kind of contract. Some artists do all the work, and some are essentially record company employees who’ll get fired if they don’t toe the line. And the label’s cut varies the same way.
Holy God and Jesus!!
Little Nemo and I agree 100%?!?!
I need a drink.
Bolding mine. I believe you misspelled “owns the “artist’s” soul”. 
FWIW I agree with your overall assessment. Different business models have different vigs.
And as we’ve seen with things like blogs and smartphone apps and eBay sellers and … and all other individual endeavors sellable online, the hard part of the road to riches is not creating good content.
It’s marketing to somehow rise above the din of (tens of) thousands of other perfectly decent content creators to become one of the tiny fraction of one percent who make the big bux. And that marketing success has mostly to do with applying dollars & marketing skill, not artistic or technical skill. Some folks win through the very, very occasional lightning bolt of viral good luck. But dollars & marketers is sure the way to bet.